A few days ago we reported that no less than 6 IP-addresses registered to the RIAA had been busted for downloading copyrighted material. Quite a shocker to everyone – including the music industry group apparently – as they are now using a defense previously attempted by many alleged file-sharers. It wasn’t members of RIAA staff who downloaded these files, the RIAA insists, it was a mysterious third party vendor who unknowingly smeared the group’s good name.

Mind you, the initial title of the article may well not be accurate to the actuality. Here's a bit of update text from the bottom of the article:

"UPDATE: Raw Story contacted another UGA Scientist, Dr. B. T. Thomas of the Department of Environmental Science, who indicated that, while it is unlikely that the Mayan people migrated en masse from Central America to settle in what is now the United States, he refused to characterize Thornton’s conclusions as “wrong,” stating that it is entirely possible that some Mayans and their descendants migrated north, bringing Mayan building and agricultural techniques to the Southeastern U.S. as they integrated with the existing indigenous people there."

Just the possibility that some of the Mayans may have migrated north is a pretty damn interesting bit of info in and of itself.

Right "refused to characterize Thornton's conclusions as "wrong"" is not the same as approving them.

There's a lot of debunking going on on this story right now, including from the archaelogist who actually made the find. BoingBoing has an interesting summary of it all :

1. Nobody found Mayan ruins in the U.S. state of Georgia. An article posted on The Examiner claimed this was the case. That article is full of it. So full of it that even the scientist cited in the article is (in a more polite way) publicly calling out The Examiner for being full of it. Mark Williams of the University of Georgia does do research on North American archaeology. He has spent 20 years excavating sites in Georgia's Oconee River valley. But these sites are not Mayan. Instead, they're part of what are broadly known as "Mississippian cultures," a conglomeration of ancient North American peoples who built a lot of earth mound structures and whose cultures are distinct from those of the Mayans and other Central Americans.

2. Do not automatically trust anything you read on The Examiner website. The Examiner is a content farm that allows anybody to write whatever they want about anything with absolutely zero oversight or fact-checking. The guy who wrote the bogus story on Mayan artifacts in Georgia appears to have just made up the entire Mississippian/Mayan connection out of his own imagination. As archaeologist Mark Williams told ArtInfo, "No archaeologist would defend this flight of fancy." (Again, this is polite scientist speak for, "Oh, my god. That guy is full of it.")

Well, yes and no. The fact that there was trade between Central American and North American indigenous civilizations in the Pre Columbian era is pretty well established. The claims in this article are really unfounded, though.

It reads like it's premised on the idea that because Mayan civilization collapsed, that the Mayan people disappeared or went somewhere else. They didn't. They are still right where they always were, in Mexico and Guatemala, to this day. Their languages are even still spoken. The cosmopolitan civilization unraveled, but the people didn't go anywhere.

It is not impossible that cultural exchange, or even some people traveled between Mayan regions and the moundbuilding civilization of the Southeastern North American region, but the Maya were a highly literate civilization. They wrote on everything. It's really stretching credulity to imagine a relocation of a significant portion of Mayan people that didn't also bring along some written evidence. They wrote on stone, remember, and this wasn't that long ago. One thousand years. There would be something more solid, some writing, some indisputable pottery, something, if a significant Mayan migration came that far north.

I guess this is what I get for missing the "at examiner.com" part snippet after the guy's name in the article. Ah well. At least I didn't actually post a link directly to an article Examiner.com. Plus, we it invoked constructive discussion, which is always a good thing ;)

Give young people accurate information, and they will use it to make better decisions that result in less harm to themselves, because teens, like everybody else, do not actually want to get hurt or become addicts.

A large metallic ball fell out of the sky on a remote grassland in Namibia, prompting baffled authorities to contact NASA and the European space agency.

The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres (43 inches) was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres (480 miles) from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.

Locals had heard several small explosions a few days beforehand, he said.

With a diameter of 35 centimetres (14 inches), the ball has a rough surface and appears to consist of "two halves welded together".

It was made of a "metal alloy known to man" and weighed six kilogrammes (13 pounds), said Ludik.

It was found 18 metres from its landing spot, a hole 33 centimetres deep and 3.8 meters wide.

Several such balls have dropped in southern Africa, Australia and Latin America in the past twenty years, authorities found in an Internet search.

The sphere was discovered mid-November, but authorities first did tests before announcing the find.